The Breach
by northno.3
Summary: After an accident on the field, Angela reflects on what she's gained and lost after twenty years. Fareeha/Angela.


After the mission, Fareeha's arm is broken in two places, sitting in a sling, and the woman still looks like its occurrence is only an annoyance to her day. Angela, by contrast, is a conflagrant wreck simmering beneath a cheap facade of medical professionalism.

With the nurses dismissed, it's just the two of them pressed together awkwardly between the curtained screens of the infirmary. It's difficult for Fareeha to lie down with her broken ribs, so Angela floats delicately from one angle of Fareeha's body to the other to the other, while the other woman stares apathetically at a picture of a sunset over a beach hanging on the wall.

Not for the first time that day, Angela grudgingly gives Helix Security's engineering department its due credit for having saved the woman from the worst (she neglects to account for the reason why Fareeha had been in danger at all, of her own carelessness that had placed the entire team at risk.) She is still embarrassed, and humbled, but most of all she has yet to shake the profound sense of terror in having helplessly watched Fareeha's body crash through a collapsed wall. The countervailing relief when Fareeha had, agonizing moments later, struggled to her knees to pull herself back to her feet, felt nothing short of elation.

All things considered, both of them have survived relatively well. Parts of Fareeha's armor are unceremoniously piled at the foot of the bench, waiting for collection so that Torbjörn could later repair the worst.

Half of the woman's shirt drops in tatters when Angela pulls away the last segment of Fareeha's armor. Taking a deep breath, Angela has to remind herself that she reviewed each scan personally, and that much of Fareeha's injuries are superficial.

Fareeha still won't look her in the eye, as if the tremendous act of courage responsible for putting her in the infirmary was something to be ashamed of. Angela hadn't said a word yet and Fareeha appears thoroughly overcome, like the entire moment breaking through a carefully planned scheme, a brief lapse in an otherwise perfectly posed artifice.

The darkened perforations in the cloth stencil a gruesome constellation where the full brunt of the mech's explosion had raked across Fareeha's torso. Angela takes comfort in the fact that the burns are not as bad as she had anticipated, and tests them with delicate touches, satisfied that with time and light treatment, they would heal on their own. The metal shards buried in Fareeha's back and shoulders are what concern her. She studied the x-rays in the illuminator in her office, and believed that their extraction could come without much discomfort on Fareeha's part.

When she informs Fareeha of the good news, the other woman hums a low tone to show that she heard. After refusing much of the medication, Fareeha had fallen unusually quiet in what Angela suspected was an exercise to isolate herself from the pain.

She suspects sometimes (too often) that Fareeha pushes herself beyond what is necessary.

"So your excessive heroism is why you don't ever have any shirts to wear." Angela offers a warm smile to accompany the joke, hoping to break the tension between them. The humor doesn't translate, but the corners of Fareeha's lips turn in acknowledgment the poor doctor is trying her best to provide levity.

"Have you been watching me, Dr. Ziegler?" Fareeha asks lightly.

Angela, realizing her mistake, hides the mild flush creeping over her face by turning back to the surgical tray, and lamenting how despite their budget, Overwatch's rec gym and physical therapy wing shared so many of the same facilities.

There are other things Angela wants to say (better things, things that would have said how appreciative she was that she had been saved a fate of being made into a blackened crater in the side of the road, a smattering of blood, hair, and bone across the facade of a building) but Fareeha isn't the person she remembers. That girl is gone, and in her place is a stranger, distant and humorless.

Their reunion had been disastrous, its memory stinging on the occasions Angela scours her brain to reimagine how it could have gone some other way. How she could have salvaged that moment; how she could have saved their old friendship and turned it into the homecoming she envisioned for them both (an idle hope imagined a lifetime ago, a cherished and fervent dream that she clung to as she sewed limbs back onto the broken bodies of shepherds and shopkeepers and pulled planted explosives from the body cavities of children.) A lifetime of waiting, and she wonders how she could have blundered it so terribly.

But Angela is never able to compromise her ideologies, not to commanders of international shadow agencies, and certainly not to nameless, self-assured (prideful) former security contractors scorning the uselessness of military bureaucracy in defending innocent civilians. And on their first meeting, the (theoretical) good intentions of private security firms notwithstanding, Angela had made her feelings on military privatization quite clear. Torbjörn had stood by helplessly, waiting for a gap in their streaming (a conversation laced with razors) to interject red-faced reintroductions. The revelations of each other's identities did little to smooth over bruised egos, and just as quickly as they had been reunited, they had become strangers once more.

The divide between them stretches, pulled by the years between them. Fareeha has grown tall (Angela is the one who peers up at her now, struggling to find a glimmer of the girl she once knew behind the wall of stoicism and imposed years of martial discipline.) Angela, herself, is all too aware that she has lost the luster that colored her youth (the product of her own journeys etching into her, pathways treaded for too long without pause, the price of prodigy, always another life slipping through her fingers that could have been saved, another loss, another failure.)

They had a closeness once, one that Fareeha seems embarrassed to remember. In the weeks after, while the new Overwatch rebirths itself into a sluggish, cumbersome start, Angela finds herself regretful and apologetic for slights she's unsure she's made. She ruthlessly polices her own thoughts, overly critical of her words and failing attempts to find a truce. She wonders if Fareeha senses it as she watches the other woman grow more at odds with the people around her.

It is quickly apparent that Fareeha fiercely disagrees with Jack's tactics. For her, the line between civilian and combatant is more critical than the soldier cares to consider. More than once, Angela spies their figures through the glass of Jack's office, arguing in muffled tones.

Reinhardt fares no better. For all of his flattery by Fareeha's childhood idolization, he is woefully inept at dealing with the woman Fareeha has grown to be.

Jesse's heart is in the right place and it gets him further than the others, but his good intentions translate with his clumsiness. During a friendly exercise at the shooting range, he gives Fareeha pointers on how best to manage a quick succession of targets (remembering, undoubtedly, as Angela did as well, of a time when at twelve-years-old, Fareeha had desperately wanted to learn how to shoot a revolver.) She replies by clapping down her visor and annihilating the target posts into smoking stubs simultaneously. When she drifts to a smooth landing, the coolness in Fareeha's gaze could have put Mei to shame.

Angela sympathizes with their efforts. She herself wishes that she had a commonality with Fareeha, a shared interest in which she could attempt to bridge the gap that has opened between them.

Their own meetings are awkward and halting. They pass each other in hallways without speaking a word. Angela painfully remembers a time when Fareeha would peek out at her from around corners, eager to find a space in Angela's busy schedule to coax an untimely adventure. Now, the hallways are empty in her wake, but Angela still looks anyways.

During the last mission, they sat side by side in the carrier without a word, and Angela resigned herself with knowing that perhaps, for a long time, the friendship she longed for existed only in her memories.

Now, she works fastidiously, making small talk of any unimportant topic she can find. Fareeha indulges her with the appropriate responses, and Angela is unreasonably glad that despite all of their newfound differences, they could at least be polite with each other. She moves mechanically, willing to let the routine guide her, grateful that with Fareeha's back turned the woman cannot see her face.

The first topic of meaning, unpredictably (miraculously) comes from Fareeha herself.

"You used to patch me up like this when we were kids." The memory returns jarringly, as strange to see it offered by Fareeha, as it was warm. Angela too had remembered the times Fareeha would come trouncing in from her practices with Ana, bruised and scraped, and eager to relay all the lessons she had learned that would make her an eventual asset to the organization. "You were always in the clinic back then. It's been... an adjustment, for me to see you in danger." From anyone else, it would have felt like condescension, but it's a shared past that Fareeha is speaking about, the memory that there had once been a naïve, freshly-minted, teenaged head of surgery who believed that all she would ever need to carry out her job could be executed from a sterile room. That the daringness and heights of her innovation could have been achieved from the safety of a lab hundreds of miles from a zone of conflict. Fareeha is mourning a child who had believed nonviolence could mean keeping one's hands bloodless, that nonviolence could be seen differently from inaction.

Angela says nothing, her gloved fingers ghosting down Fareeha's back, sticky with blood. Under the flaking rivulets of carmine, it's hard to discern old wounds from the new. She cleans the grime with practiced efficiency, her eyes skipping over the pink, hard abscesses of Fareeha's skin, the gnarled ridges and valleys carved by metal and time. Her fingertips bump over the knots of bone in Fareeha's mended ribs, the mars of battles Ana had tried in vain to shield her from.

Angela has long learned the names and types of artillery that kills the soldiers that cross her table. A small gasp of pain leaves Fareeha's lips when Angela's forceps pull the last shard of shrapnel from her shoulder. The largest fragment of a shattered copper jacket clanks into the tray and Fareeha holds the edge of the bench to steady herself.

Angela places a hand around Fareeha's midsection to help, looking up and finding that Fareeha is still regarding her affectionately, after the doctor quickly followed the fresh stream of blood with squares of gauze and quick-stitching wound sealant.

"I was trying to impress you."

It takes a moment for Angela to realize that Fareeha isn't talking about her injuries, the errant explosion she had shielded them from, the moment the woman had abandoned her post and all restraint and raced down from the sky. "I was so surprised, but the truth is, I recognized you immediately." When Fareeha smiles this time, the fondness reaches her eyes.

Twenty years ago, Fareeha had left on a promise, that she would find her mother, and at the same time also find the person she was meant to be, someone strong and worthy. At the time, Angela hadn't had the foresight to ask what Fareeha had meant by "worthy" or what even such a vague aspiration meant in concrete terms. She hadn't the courage now (yet) to tell Fareeha that it didn't matter how much she changed (how much they had both changed), stints in mercenary corporations or not, that Fareeha was the bravest and most noble person in the world.

Pain seeps into Angela's heart and she suddenly wished very much that she could have grown into the person Fareeha had wanted her to become, the person Fareeha had also painstakingly longed to see again.

"I should have known you would have changed in other ways." Fareeha's voice is soft with regret. It's an apology, and Fareeha makes its intent clear when she touches Angela's palm carefully with her fingertips.

"We both have." Angela replies.

A bandage winds under Fareeha's broken arm and across her torso. It holds her wounds in place of the words Angela cannot find, in place of confession that are too much, too fast for a moment as tenuous as this. Words such as _, I'm sorry. I missed you. I thought about you everyday you were gone, everyday until you became a memory, a prayer, a dream._

She is suddenly afraid she is holding Fareeha's hand too tightly, but the answering squeeze reassures her.

"But not everything." Fareeha says, her eyes dark and searching.

Angela knows that whatever answer Fareeha wants is surely on her face as she follows the lines of Fareeha's sculpted neck, the curve of her jaw, and holds her gaze. This time, there's no hiding the blush coloring Angela's cheeks when Fareeha takes her by the waist.

"Not everything." Angela agrees, breathlessly taking Fareeha's kiss and returning her own, trying her best not to press too hard, to not cling too tightly, to not want too much, to remember that this is a beginning, a start. But Fareeha's greed matches her own; with her good arm she scoops Angela up and suddenly their positions are reversed with Angela on the table and Fareeha standing between her knees. Fareeha's hunger surprises her, the depths of which she tastes briefly before it sinks down again, and distantly Angela wonders if there would be one day she could persuade her from the need to be so gallant.

When they pull apart, Fareeha is giggling, and all at once, like a miracle springing from a wasteland, she returns to her: a ghost given form, a life stolen and now returned. Angela marvels at her, a girl she thought lost and dead to the endless march of bloodshed, unbroken and whole.

Angela laughs too, her voice breaking with long-held exhaustion, her relief blurring her vision. She allows herself to lean partially on Fareeha's frame, their foreheads pressed together, taking comfort in the strength she finds there, the astonishing ease in which she has always been comforted by Fareeha's quiet presence.

And on their second meeting, they come together again without words.


End file.
